BeautyIsTruth Beauty Is Truth What's this bit about "beauty is truth"? Is it true--or is is just poetry? It's from a poem, "Ode On A Grecian Urn," written by John Keats in May, 1819, when he was about 24. The urn is apparently decorated with a picture of a youth playing a flute in a pastoral setting and a young man chasing a young woman around the urn. She may well wish him to catch her--but the important thing is that on the urn, the music is silent and the chase, perpetual. And of course, it's worth remembering here that the function of an urn is to hold for eternity the ashes of the dead. The poem begins with some questions about the figures pictured on the urn, then moves to this statement: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter. . . . / Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. . . .

/ Forever wilt thou love and she be fair!" The poem ends with these lines, apparently addressed to the urn itself: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. The words in question--"beauty is truth"--appear to be uttered by the urn, as if it were some sort of oracle--or maybe in the way a shell speaks for the sea when you hold it to your ear. Unfortunately, the quotation marks appeared in the first published edition, in 1820, but not in any of five other reproductions of the poem made in that year. So no one seems to know now whether the quoted words are spoken by the urn and the rest by Keats or a persona, or whether the persona speaks all of the words. Nor is there much agreement as to whether the lines express a universal truth--or are just poetic blather. Keats himself apparently never explained his intentions. He died of tuberculosis in 1821, only about eight years after beginning his career as a poet.

The portrait below was made shortly before he died. Oh, one more thing: The predecessor to this web page is a sheet of paper on my college office door bearing a picture of a Grecian urn and the last two lines of Keats' poem--"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." There's also my own question, "Is this so--or is it just poetry?" I taped the paper to my door around 1990, after learning that several of my English department colleagues had lied to destroy another teacher's reputation and had falsified official college records and perjured themselves in a lawsuit. Over the years the paper has been on my door, a number of persons have added their own comments, some ugly, some lovely. My favorite of all is one where the contributor crossed out my word "poetry" and wrote in "pottery." Terrific! (You know, beauty is skin deep, but lovely comes from the heart. How could it be other than true?) Several other notable personages have made pronouncements about truth and beauty. Here are a few I've found interesting or amusing.

First, let's have a few equations that may be axiomatic: Beauty (yes??? if so, what about the others?) Next, a conundrum of sorts: "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound statement." --Niels Bohr (Laurence J. Peter, Peter's Quotations, New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1977, 500.) Compare that with this, which I heard in an episode of the PBS biography of Robert Oppenheimer. (I'm not positive I've got it verbatim, but pretty sure of the terms"shallow" and "deep." ) SHALLOW TRUTH--has as its contrary that the opposite is false. DEEP TRUTH--when true has an opposite which may also at least in part be true. Bohr and Oppenheimer were physicists. Their work was important in developing the atomic bomb.

: Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats - Analysis Contact Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats Written in 1819, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ was the third of the five ‘great odes’ of 1819, which are generally believed to have been written in the following order – Psyche, Nightingale, Grecian Urn, Melancholy, and Autumn. Of the five, Grecian Urn and Melancholy are merely dated ‘1819’. Critics have used vague references in Keats’s letters as well as thematic progression to assign order.

(‘Ode on Indolence’, though written in March 1819, perhaps before Grecian Urn, is not considered one of the ‘great odes’.) This ode contains the most discussed two lines in all of Keats’s poetry – ‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ The exact meaning of those lines is disputed by everyone; no less a critic than TS Eliot considered them a blight upon an otherwise beautiful poem. Scholars have been unable to agree to whom the last thirteen lines of the poem are addressed. Arguments can be made for any of the four most obvious possibilities, -poet to reader, urn to reader, poet to urn, poet to figures on the urn. The issue is further confused by the change in quotation marks between the original manuscript copy of the ode and the 1820 published edition. (This issue is further discussed at the bottom of this page.) Crop from George Keats’s manuscript copy of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ You can view part of the earliest known manuscript below.

Please note that it is a transcription in George Keats’s handwriting; Keats’s original manuscript / first draft is lost. Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunt about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs!

that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Note: In 1997, Dennis Dean published an article in the Philological Quarterly titled ‘Some Quotations in Keats’s Poetry’. In it, he discussed the problem of the final quotation, linking it with the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds. I think it reasonably settles the ‘quotation issue’: “In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats will say exactly the same thing, more elegantly but more cryptically also: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”–surely the most famous equation in English literature and precisely correct in suggesting the Newtonian origin of the unstated “proof.” Many readers of Annals of the Fine Arts would probably have recognized the source of Keats’s equation in the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds because of their familiarity with Reynolds and because the whole technique of allusion (or even short quotation) was fundamental to the neoclassicism in which both Reynolds and his readers had been educated.

In the second published version of 1820, moreover, Keats represents this portion, and this portion only, of the urn’s utterance as a quotation–but as a quotation within a quotation. If one were free to punctuate the final pair of lines in the “Ode” according to present-day editorial practice, they would (in my view) look like this: “‘Beauty is truth; truth, beauty’–that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The urn, in other words, begins by quoting Sir Joshua (for Keats and his readers, the world’s greatest authority on art of all kinds), implicitly affirms the sufficiency of human intellect, explicitly affirms the equation of beauty and truth, and pronounces this knowledge entirely sufficient to create the elegant geometry of such superb art as the urn. Because of the uniformity of human minds and passions, moreover, the figures inscribed on the urn (which puzzle the observer at first glance) become intelligible as we relate them to our own experience. The first stanza of the poem is filled with questions; the last, with none.

Being art, the urn retains its ability to “speak” to all who observe it, reminding us of our paradoxical dilemma as mortals who exist in finite time.” Source: ‘Some Quotations in Keats’s Poetry’ by Dennis R. Dean. From the Philological Quarterly. Volume: 76. Issue: 1, 1997. Read More English History Topics Link/cite this page If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content. Hanson, Marilee. "Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats" <a href=""> February 1, 2015 Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats" , February 1, 2015 More from Keats Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty? - Scientific American Scientific American Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty?

How Keats's famous line applies to math and science By Martin Gardner on April 1, 2007 by Ian Stewart Basic Books, 2007 The title of Ian Stewart's book (he has written more than 60 others) is, of course, taken from the enigmatic last two lines of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. But what on earth did Keats mean? T. S. Eliot called the lines "meaningless" and "a serious blemish on a beautiful poem." John Simon opened a movie review with "one of the greatest problems of art--perhaps the greatest--is that truth is not beauty, beauty not truth. Nor is it all we need to know." Stewart, a distinguished mathematician at the University of Warwick in England and a former author of this magazine's Mathematical Recreations column, is concerned with how Keats's lines apply to mathematics. "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare," Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote.

To mathematicians, great theorems and great proofs, such as Euclid's elegant proof of the infinity of primes, have about them what Bertrand Russell described as "a beauty cold and austere," akin to the beauty of great works of sculpture. Stewart's first 10 chapters, written in his usual easygoing style, constitute a veritable history of mathematics, with an emphasis on the concept of symmetry. When you perform an operation on a mathematical object, such that after the operation it looks the same, you have uncovered a symmetry. A simple operation is rotation. No matter how you turn a tennis ball, it does not alter the ball's appearance. It is said to have rotational symmetry. Capital "H" has 180-degree rotational symmetry because it is unchanged when turned upside down. It also has mirror reflection symmetry because it looks the same in a mirror. A swastika has 90-degree rotational symmetry but lacks mirror reflection symmetry because its mirror image whirls the other way. Associated with every kind of symmetry is a "group." Stewart explains the group concept in a simple way by considering operations on an equilateral triangle. Rotate it 60 degrees in either direction, and it looks the same.

Every operation has an "inverse," that cancels the operation. Imagine the corners of the triangle labeled A, B and C. A 60-degree clockwise rotation alters the corners' positions. If this is followed by a similar rotation the other way, the original positions are restored. If you do nothing to the triangle, this is called the "identity" operation. The set of all symmetry transformations of the triangle constitutes its group. Stewart's history begins with Babylonian and Greek mathematics, introducing their basic concepts in ways a junior high school student can understand. As his history proceeds, the math slowly becomes more technical, especially when he gets to complex numbers and their offspring, the quaternions and octonions. The history ends with the discoveries of Sophus Lie, for whom Lie groups are named, and the work of a little-known German mathematician, Joseph Killing, who classified Lie groups. Through this historical section, Stewart skillfully interweaves the math with colorful sketches of the lives of the mathematicians involved. Not until the book's second half does Stewart turn to physics and explain how symmetry and group theory became necessary tools. A chapter on Albert Einstein is a wonderful blend of elementary relativity and details of Einstein's life.

Next comes quantum mechanics and particle theory, with several pages on superstrings, the hottest topic in today's theoretical physics. Stewart is a bit skeptical of string theory, which sees all fundamental particles as inconceivably tiny filaments of vibrating energy that can be open-ended or closed like a rubber band. He does not mention two recent books (reviewed in the September 2006 issue of Scientific American) that give string theory a severe bashing. Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics denounces string theory as "not a theory at all," only a mishmash of bizarre speculations in search of a viable theory. Peter Woit's book is entitled Not Even Wrong, a quote from the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He once described a theory as so bad it was "not even wrong." [break] Is string theory beautiful? Its promoters think so. Smolin and Woit believe that its recent absorption into a richer conjecture called M-theory has turned the former beauty of strings into mathematical structures as ugly as the epicycles Ptolemy invented to explain the orbits of planets as they circle the earth. We are back to the mystery of Keats's notorious lines. In my opinion, John Simon is right.

Even beautiful mathematical proofs can be wrong. In 1879 Sir Alfred Kempe published a proof of the four-color map theorem. It was so elegant that for 10 years it was accepted as sound. Alas, it was not. Henry Dude?ney, England's great puzzle maker, published a much shorter and even prettier false proof. In The New Ambidextrous Universe I write about the vortex theory of atoms. This popular 19th-century conjecture had an uncanny resemblance to superstrings. It maintained that atoms are not pointlike but are incredibly tiny loops of energy that vibrate at different frequencies. They are minute whirlpools in the ether, a rigid, frictionless substance then believed to permeate all space. The atoms have the structure of knots and links, their shapes and vibrations generating the properties of all the elements. Once created by the Almighty, they last forever. In researching vortex theory, I came across many statements by eminent physicists, including Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell, suggesting that vortex theory was far too beautiful not to be true. Papers on the topic proliferated, books about it were published. Scottish mathematician Peter Tait's work on vortex atoms led to advances in knot theory.

Tait predicted it would take several generations to develop the theory's mathematical foundations. Beautiful though it seemed, the vortex theory proved to be a glorious road that led nowhere. Stewart concludes his book with two maxims. The first: "In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps." The second: "In mathematics beauty must be true--because anything false is ugly." I agree with the first statement, but not the second. We have seen how lovely proofs by Kempe and Dudeney were flawed. Moreover, there are simply stated theorems for which ugly proofs may be the only ones possible. Let me cite two recent examples. Proof of the four-color map theorem required a computer printout so vast and dense that it could be checked only by other computer programs. Although there may be a beautiful proof recorded in what Paul Erd?s called "God's book"--a book that, he suggested, included all the theorems of mathematics and their most beautiful proofs--it is possible that God's book contains no such proof. The same goes for Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem. It is not computer-based, but it is much too long and complicated to be called beautiful.

There may be no beautiful proof for this theorem. Of course, mathematicians can always hope and believe otherwise. Because symmetry is the glue and tape that binds the pages of Stewart's admirable history, a stanza from Lewis Carroll's immortal nonsense ballad The Hunting of the Snark could serve as an epigraph for the book: You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue: You condense it with locusts and tape: Still keeping one principal object in view-- To preserve its symmetrical shape. Advertisement | Report Ad ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) Martin Gardner wrote Scientific American's Mathematical Games column for 25 years. His latest book, The Annotated Hunting of the Snark, was published last year by W. W. Norton.

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats | Poetry Foundation Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn Related Poem Content Details Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." What is the meaning of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"? « We must think, if we are to survive | Main | Thanks from a reader » What is the meaning of “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”?

As I have mentioned before, through my entire life, to my great frustration, I have not understood what Keats means when he says, in the last stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I’ve seen various explanations, but they seemed abstract to me and none of them satisfactorily answered my question. Then, about 20 years ago, the answer came to me in an intuitive flash. Unfortunately I didn’t write my idea down and I subsequently forgot it. So I’m more frustrated than ever. And I’m even more frustrated by my failure to understand the poem’s climactic line, because “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is to me one of the two most beautiful poems in the English language, the other being Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” What follows is not an intuitive leap, but an attempt to work out intellectually what that line may mean. Obviously what I’m about to say is not a complete explanation. It is an attempt to get at one side of the line’s possible significance. First, what is “truth”? One definition of truth is that it is the inner order of a thing, its structure.

Christians, for example, speak of “Christian truth.” Now the first and most obvious meaning of the term “Christian truth” is that that the affirmations of the Christian religion correspond with objective reality. But that is not the definition of truth that I am getting at here. In my usage, “Christian truth” is the inner structure of Christian experience, namely the relationship of the individual believer with God through Jesus Christ, the relationship of the individual believer with Christ through the eucharist, and many other very particular things involved in Christian experience. Similarly, the truth of, say, amphibians—“Amphibian truth,” if you will—is the structure, the order, of amphibians. It is the parts of the amphibian, and the relation of those parts to the whole. It is that which makes all amphibians, regardless of their mutual distinctions from each other, amphibians and not something else. Now what is “beauty”? Beauty is also a mutual interrelation of parts that forms a whole, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Let’s take an example from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” itself, starting at the fifth line of the first stanza: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities, or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? My focus here is on the line, “What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape,” which has always enchanted me. What does its beauty consist of? First, there is the image of a leaf-fringed legend, the idea of such a thing, which is so beautiful. Then, inseparable from the image, is the exquisite sound of the words that convey the image, with the alliteration of the “l’s” (“leaf” and “legend”) and the soft “g’s” (“fringed” and “legend”) that is hauntingly beautiful (and you will realize this even more if you recite the poem aloud and hear the sounds in your ears and feel the texture of the sounds in your mouth). The sounds of the words, and the thing they describe, combine into a perfect whole that elicits feelings of great pleasure. To me, I can’t think offhand of anything in Shakespeare that is as beautiful as that line.

(I’m not seeking to compare mountaintops here, just stating my personal feeling.) Beauty, then, is an order, a structure, a relation of parts that form a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And this also was our definition of truth. Truth and beauty are, in this essential respect, the same. Of course they are not entirely the same. Truth speaks to the intellect, beauty to the emotions. But they are the same in that they are both revelations of the order of existence which is larger than ourselves. They both bring us into a relationship with, and a participation in, the order of being. - end of initial entry - Thomas Bertonneau writes: Regarding Keats’ “Urn,” which I have taught every semester for twenty years, I assume, given the many references to death and sacrifice in the poem, that the “Attic shape” is a funerary urn, as if to say that even our mortality, because it belongs to truth, is beautiful.

The “gooseflesh” lines are, for me, these â Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone … Gintas writes: I have difficulty with poetry, I blame it on my shabby government schooling. There are things I do to try to make up for it … But even the most benighted of your readers should appreciate the beauty of “Ode to the End of Liberalism”. I don’t even need the poem to exist for it to strike an inner chord that is perfectly beautiful. LA replies: You may not know much about poetry, but you are a funny guy. Buck O. writes: (I apologize for this comment. I often butt into a conversation where I don’t belong. I didn’t read the entry. I have never studied or even read poetry though I have written some to women. I’ve lived an essentially physical existence—athletics and labor—up until about five years ago, when I hit the wall, and flat ran out of gas.

That is the truth, and it ain’t so beautiful.) This is probably unrelated, and is more of a question, but, it is what immediately came to mind. I’m certain that many have said this, though I’ve not read it. A thought occurred to me years ago, and it just popped out of my mouth. I immediately understood it and a full argument took form. I hope this doesn’t sound foolish. I have long been convinced that all human action is motivated purely by self-interest. I don’t know why, and it has always bothered me because it seems to be a profound contradiction to what else I believe. On the surface it sounds as if I think like a pure materialist—that we are lumps of bio-mechanical and chemical processors and reactors. I know that we are more than that—that we transcend the material. I won’t waste your time with my thinking. One point is that we are motivated to act by personal “incentives” which themselves serve our different interests, i.e., love, honor, duty, or greed, avarice, hate,etc. And, that no human action is effected by indifference.

For instance, the concept of altruism, which I could spend time on, is a contradiction by definition—a selfless act. How can a “self” act without being involved? The term is useful, but it’s not accurate. I went to the end of this entry and read only your last paragraph. It was all that I needed to hear. “Beauty and truth, emotions and intellect—the order of our existence.” This seems to satisfy, sort of, the contradiction in my thinking—that, though I’m convinced that we are purely self-interested actors, which is how we are able to function, we are ordered that way just as God has ordered everything in our universe and all of the mechanics or physics by which it operates. Though I am always self-interested and cannot act otherwise, I am designed that way and given the free will to choose which interests are mine. I love my son more than anyone else, and I want him to know it. But, even if he did not know it, my soul or spirit would be empty if I didn’t. My love for him fills a need. Like any materialist who refuses to accept creation and any transcendent truth, what can “beauty” or “truth” mean to them?

This is incomplete and probably half-baked, and it still feels too mechanized. It just seems that your description of an order of existence for all of our moving parts, adding up to a whole which is greater, makes me feel better about what I’ve been thinking. (I hope that I made some sense.) Rick Darby writes: The first part of Keats’s poetic equation is easier to grasp than the second. In writing that beauty is truth, Keats surely means truth in a more elevated sense than as used in daily life (he’s telling the truth, the truth of the matter, etc.). He means a higher kind of truth. Higher how? It’s hard to express in words, because of a different order than what we ordinarily perceive. But it’s safe to say that most people at one time or another, seeing or hearing something of exquisite beauty, sense that for moment they are transported to—or at least get a hint—of a level of being more refined, richer in meaning, more spiritual. More real. Truer.

So we can say that beauty (which I won’t try to define, but if anyone doesn’t know what it is, I’m sorry for them) is a kind of lens or window that gives us a glimpse of a greater dimension of reality, closer to God or the source of being or Meaning. But what can we say about “truth [being] beauty”? Even many things we firmly believe to be true aren’t beautiful; often quite the reverse. Nor, I think, is this a simple comparative statement: truth is more beautiful than falsehood. Again, the only way to make sense of it is to assume that this refers to a higher truth. When Plato talked of the good, the true, and the beautiful as being Ideas rather than just qualities, he also must have meant something greater by truth than just correct premises and a correct logical syllogism. Both Keats and Plato are talking about Truth, not truths: a reality with the power to inspire, albeit one that can’t be adequately expressed in words because it’s transcendent. If you accept that beauty is truth in some sense, then the obverse (or do I mean converse?) must also be true. By sheer logic, if a equals b, than b equals a.

As an illustration rather than an explanation of what Keats means, I nominate the Portland Vase in the British Museum. It’s Roman rather than Greek, but the effect on me is similar to what Keats must have felt in the presence of his Grecian urn. Gintas writes: Buck O. said, “I have long been convinced that all human action is motivated purely by self-interest.” He then proceeds to convince me he is not at all convinced. Much of we do does indeed have an element of self-interest, because the world is made with cause-and-effect, and we cannot get away from it. But purely by self-interest? On one hand Randian “self-interest” is way overblown to describe such things as breathing and eating and sleeping and not jumping off a bridge; but on the other hand, it falls far short of characterizing the more noble and beautiful things in life, which often have some mystery to them. But I do believe Buck O. thinks higher than that, I think he may be discovering something downright poetic in his own heart. Laura Wood writes: This is great. You are speaking of intellectual truth, but the same can be said of moral truth and its relation to beauty.

The true and the good are intimately related. LA replies: Yes, the next step in the discussion is moral truth, as in Matthew Arnold’s trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Laura replies: Virtue is equivalent to the supreme knowledge (Antonin Sertillanges). January 7 Malcolm Pollack writes: I’ve wondered about Keats’s meaning too, ever since I first read the “Ode To a Grecian Urn” in a poetry seminar as a young man. After a while, I found a metaphor that helped clarify it for me. Truth and Beauty, distinct words with distinct meanings, surely are not one and the same at the level of ordinary understanding, but of course Keats yearned to see further. What helped me in my struggle to grasp his meaning was to imagine Keats standing between the parallel lines of Truth and Beauty, gazing along them in wonder as they recede into mystery in the direction of the ultimate Good—to which, he knew in his heart, both must surely lead. And just as parallel lines converge only at infinity, Truth and Beauty achieve Keats’s ultimate unity in a numinous place infinitely beyond rational apprehension: the transcendent mind of God.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 06, 2011 11:01 AM | Send Essay on “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” -- Poetry Analysis Essay on “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” :: 5 Works Cited Length: 761 words (2.2 double-spaced pages) Rating: Yellow Open Document - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Of the five odes written by John Keats, this ode was written to show the beauty of love through a work of art. This work of art is a Grecian Urn, one side adorned with a woman being pursued by a “bold lover” and on the other a priest leading a heifer to be sacrificed. The beauty of this poem is given in five stanzas of iambic pentameter with a two part rhyme scheme, giving the poem a sense of a two part structure and, furthermore, two meanings just as there are two sides of the urn.

The manifest meaning is one of the picture being timeless and the love eternal, while the latent meaning is that of silence and how love can be expressed without word or sound. Keats begins this depiction of beauty in the first stanza by describing the woman, the “bride of quietness”. She is said to be the “foster-child of Silence and slow Time”; Keats uses the term foster-child to demonstrate the difference between the work of art and humanity. The woman is a foster-child of Time because she is “for ever young” and beautiful while the natural children of Time are forever changing and aging. Keats then goes on to say how the woman tells a “tale more sweetly than our own rhyme” (Wood, 1). The tale she tells is one of love, endearment, and the pursuit of love. Our rhyme could not possibly overpower the beauty of this tale of love when our words are forgotten as quickly as they are spoken. A piece of art, however, is eternal. The second stanza begins to appeal to the underlying theme of silence. As the still work of art tells a tale more sweetly than our rhyme, so does the unheard melody sound sweeter than one that is heard.

The speaker says to “pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone,” or to sing a song to the spirit that has no tone because the spiri... ... middle of paper ... ...ecian Urn" by John Keats(article) by Muhhammad Hesham." AuthorsDen. AuthorsDen, Inc, 16 September 2008. Web. 08 Mar 2010. . Lien, Henry. "Deep Freezing in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and In Memoriam." The Victorian Web. VictorianWeb, July 2000. Web. 14 Mar 2010. . Trumann, Alisa. "Poetry Analysis: Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats - by Alisa Trumann." Helium. Helium, Inc, n.d. Web. 08 Mar 2010. . Wood, Kerry. "Poetry Analysis: Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats – by Kerry Wood." Helium. Helium, Inc, n.d. Web. 08 Mar 2010. .

Keats’ Concept of Beauty/ Discuss Keats ‘Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty’. | NeoEnglish Home Keats’ Concept of Beauty/ Discuss Keats ‘Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty’. Keats’ Concept of Beauty/ Discuss Keats ‘Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty’. neoenglish MA English-Literature Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty constitutes his aestheticism. Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman and in art. For him, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’. When we think of Keats, ‘Beauty’ comes to our mind. Keats and Beauty have become almost synonymous. We cannot think of Keats without thinking of Beauty. Beauty is an abstraction, it does not give out its meaning easily. For Keats, it is not so. He sees Beauty everywhere. Keats made Beauty his object of wonder and admiration and he became the greatest poet of Beauty. All the Romantic poets had a passion for one thing or the other. Wordsworth was the worshipper of Nature and Coleridge was a poet of the supernatural. Shelley stood for ideals and Byron loved liberty.

With Keats the passion for Beauty was the greatest, rather the only consideration. In the letters of Keats, we frequently read about his own ideas about Beauty. In one of his letters to George and Tom, he wrote: “With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates another consideration.” He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most passionate lover of the world as the career of beautiful images and of many imaginative associations of an object or word with a heightened emotional appeal. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. Keats loved ‘the mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things’. He could see Beauty everywhere and in every object. Beauty appeared to him in various forms and shapes—in the flowers and in the clouds, in the hills and rills, in the song of a bird and in the face of a woman, in a great book and in the legends of old. Beauty was there in the pieces of stone with carvings thereon. He hated didacticism in poetry.

For the poetry itself was beauty so he wrote, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” ’The lines of his poem ‘Endymion’ have become a maxim: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness” He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or experience. He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the realm of imagination. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained untouched by revolutionary theories for the regression of mankind. His later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Hyperion” show an increasing interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived he would have established a closer contact with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of escape. With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical doctrine but for the expression of beauty. He aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake.

Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful according to the recognized standards. He had deep insight to see beauty even in those things are hostile to beauty for ordinary people. He said: “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.” Keats perceives Beauty through his natural and spontaneous application of senses. He has an extraordinary sense-perception. He could perceive objects more intensely than other people. He derived great aesthetic delight at the sight of objects of Nature, of a fair face, of the works of art, legends old and new. Haydon, his friend, observed that “the humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed and his mouth quivered.” Every moment revealed to him a sensation of wonder and delight. He wrote, “The setting sun would always set me to right, or if a sparrow were before my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the gravel.” He derived aesthetic delight through his senses. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm: “Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too” Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics. Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach. Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy.

His great odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian Urn; a nightingale; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. The appreciation of Beauty in Keats is through mind or spirit. The approach becomes intellectual as he endorsees in ‘Ode on Grecian Urn’: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty -that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” Art has captured Beauty of life and made it a truth for all the ages to be “a friend to man.” It is not the logical reaching after facts that helps in understanding the truth of things. Keats wrote, ‘What the imagination seizes as beauty must be true’ and it is his powerful assertion. His logic is simple: what is beautiful is truthful. What is ugly cannot be truthful. Find truth through beauty and beauty through truth. Beauty is no more a sensuous, physical or sentimental affair. It has spiritual associations; it is a concern of the soul of man for the salvation of man.

Search for salvation must come from the heart of man and Keats knew it: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” But a true poet sees life as a whole. A true poet, in the words of Keats, enjoys light and shade foul and fair with the same delight. Thus, his concept of beauty encompasses Joy and Sorrow and Melancholy and Happiness which cannot be separated. Imagination reveals a new aspect of beauty, which is ‘sweeter’ than beauty which is perceptible to the senses. The senses perceive only the external aspect of beauty, but imagination apprehends its essence. Like this:

Question: Who, in a poem, wrote "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty"?
Answer: (John) KEATS